Sunday, July 07, 2019

[uqvqwezr] Blinking time

Create a joke device which all it does is blink the following text when plugged into power:

Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 UTC 1970

This is the output of
TZ= date --date=@0

This like the blinking 12:00 or 00:00 which digital clocks often do after a power failure, except our device suggests (incorrectly) that it is running Unix so has reset to zero Unix time (and its time is not advancing).

Blinking 88:88, also a common 7-segment digital clock failure mode after power failure, is like all bits set, so its Unix time equivalent would be blinking

Tue Jan 19 03:14:07 UTC 2038

From
TZ= date --date=@2147483647

Is there a more elegant way to get the end of the 32-bit Unix time epoch, without needing to hardcode the magic number?

One could also hardcode a time zone.

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